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Homemade Pickles! A Recipe

First off…..like my new theme?! 🙂 I LOVE IT! It took me SOOOOO long to pick one out, and to make the header, so that makes me love it even more!

Secondly….pickles. Homemade!! They’re awesome!! I used to hate pickles actually…and I don’t know what happened, but I love them now. My bff Becca came over allll the way from Buffalo a few weeks ago, and we decided we needed to make pickles. She had bought the stuff to make it a bunch of times but never got around to it…so we pretty much NEEDED to make these things. And it really couldn’t have been easier! The only hard part about it was waiting a few days (because we couldn’t even wait a week, like we said we would) to try them!

Honestly I can’t even remember exactly what we made, because we switched so many things up, but I DO know we made bread and butter ones and we used this recipe for them, and then we made a plain brine and added some dill. They were delicious! I know for next time I’ll switch a fewww things up, but for our first time, I think we did good!

We started by getting our cucumbers. We got 2 1/2 lbs of kirby’s at my (adorable) farmers market, and washed them up. How cute are they?!?!

Then, (and this is my favorite part, because I’m totally superficial with my food and crafts and they have to look perfect lol) I have this wavy cutter that I used to cut them into perfect little pickle slices!

AHHH I can’t stand how cute they are!

Next, we cut up some onions, mixed them in with the sliced cucumbers and ice (this makes them stay nice and crunchy) and sprinkled pickling salt all over them. I don’t particularly love raw onions, so while they did lend a great flavor, I’ll probably only cut up one onion (opposed to a pound!) next time. They say that you should keep them on ice for 4 hours, but we had them on probably an hour, IF that, and they were super crunchy!

While our pickles and onions hung out in the ice, we made our brine. This is the recipe we based our brine on:

2 1/2 lbs pickling cucumbers (fresh from the market)

1 pound white or yellow onions, thinly sliced

1/4 cup pickling salt (can use Kosher salt as a substitute, regular table salt has additives in it that will turn the pickles dark and muddy the color of the pickle juice)

1 1/4 cup white distilled vinegar (5% acidity)

1 cup apple cider vinegar (5% acidity)

2 1/4 cups sugar

1 Tbsp mustard seeds

1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

3/4 teaspoon celery seeds

1 inch cinnamon stick

6 allspice berries plus a pinch of ground allspice

6 whole cloves plus a pinch of ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Instead of all those different spices, we just got pickling spice, that we subbed all that out for 2 tablespoons. Next time, I think I’ll even do 1 tablespoon as the spices were pretty strong! We also used white vinegar instead of apple cider (next time I want to try the apple cider though). And finally, the amount of sugar seems like SOOOO much (this brine only filled up ONE Ball quart jar!!) So I’ll cut that in half next time. I know you’re not consuming all 2 1/4 cups of sugar, but I still feel it’s excessive (as delicious as they were! lol)

Once the brine started to boil, (which BE AWARE, it’s hard to breathe in the room when this stuff is on the stove top, so open a window!!) we rinsed the pickling salt off our onions and cucumbers, and started packing them into the jars (which were sterilized in the dishwasher).

Then we sterilized the jar lids in boiling water for a few minutes.

We poured the brine over the cucumbers and onions, topped them off with some dill, and they were done!! The lids should “pop” to properly seal. The smaller ones we made popped a lot faster than the larger ones. How pretty are they?!

The other brine we made I think was literally just the vinegar and the pickling spices. Both were really good, but I looove me some sweet pickles!! 🙂

**Have a project you made using one of my tutorials? Show it off! I, along with all my followers, would love to see it! 🙂 I’ve started a new page on my blog called “Your Pictures!”, located right next to the “About This Blog!” link at the top of my blog. Check it out for more information, and to see other fan pics (I just added some great ones today!!)!**